Hispanic and Lusophone women filmmakers

Theory, practice and difference

Edited by Parvati Nair, Julian Gutierrez-Albilla

Publication date:

06 December 2012

Length of book:

296 pages

Publisher

Manchester University Press

Dimensions:

234x156mm

ISBN-13: 9780719083570

This volume examines the films of Hispanic and Lusophone women filmmakers from the 1930s to the present day. It establishes productive connections between film practices across these geographical areas by identifying common areas of concern on the part of these female filmmakers.

Focusing on aesthetic, theoretical and socio-historical analyses, it questions the manifest or latent gender and sexual politics that inform and structure the emerging cinematic productions by women filmmakers in Portugal, Spain, Latin America and the US.

With a combination of scholars from the UK, the US, Spain and Latin America, the volume documents and interprets a fascinating corpus of films made by Hispanic and Lusophone women and proposes research strategies and methodologies that can expand our understanding of socio-cultural and psychic constructions of gender and sexual politics. An essential resource to rethink notions of gender identity and subjectivity, it is a unique contribution to Spanish and Latin American Film Studies and Film Studies.

Introduction – Parvati Nair and Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla
1. Transnational co-productions and female filmmakers: the cases of Lucrecia Martel and Isabel Coixet – Paul Julian Smith
Part I: Memory and History
2. Lost and invisible: a history of Latin American women filmmakers – Patricia Torres San Martín
3. Feminine spaces of memory: mourning and melodrama in Para que no me olvides (2005) by Patricia Ferreira – Isolina Ballesteros
4. Women filmmakers and citizenship in Brazil from Bossa Nova to the Retomada – Catherine Benamou and Leslie Marsh
5. Ana Mariscal: signature, event, context – Steven Marsh
6. Rosario Pi and the challenge of social and cinematic conventions during the Second Republic – Alejandro Melero Salvador
7. Deterritorialised intimacies: The documentary legacy of Sara Gómez in three contemporary women filmmakers – María Caridad Cumana González and Susan Lord
Part II: Culture and conflict
8. Ana Díez: Basque cinema, gender and the (home)land – Ann Davies
9. Slipping discursive frameworks: gender (and) politics in Colombian women’s documentary – Deborah Martin
10. The 'poetics of transformation' in the works of Lourdes Portillo – Rosa Linda Fregoso
Part III: Migration, transnationalism and borders
11. A disjunctive order: place and space in Isabel Coixet’s The Secret Life of Words (2005) – Helena López
12. Reconfiguring the rural: fettered geographies, unsettled histories and the abyss of alienation in the work of Spanish women filmmakers – Parvati Nair
13. Tracing the border: the “frontier condition” in María Novaro’s Sin dejar huella – Sofía Ruiz-Alfaro
Part IV: Subjectivity
14. Genealogies of the self: (auto)biography in Sandra Kogut’s Um passaporte húngaro (2001) and Albertina Carri’s Los rubios (2003) – Charlotte Gleghorn
15. Filming in the feminine: subjective realism, social disintegration and bodily affection in Lucrecia Martel’s La ciénaga (2001) – Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla
16. Everything to play for: renegotiating Chilean identity in Alicia Scherson’s Play (2005) – Sarah Wright
17. The politics of pathos in Pilar Miró’s Gary Cooper, que estás en los cielos (1980) – Tom Whittaker
18. Icíar Bollaín’s 'Carte de Tendre': mapping female subjectivity for the turn of the millennium – Jo Evans
19. Murmuring another ('s) story: histories under the sign of the feminine, pre- and post- the Portuguese Revolution of 1974 – Rui Gonçalves Miranda

All in all, these essays walk a virtuoso tightrope, exploring alterity and agency high up in the air, by helping us to see all sorts of directorial ‘slippages’, and are thus unique and valued additions to our reading on film.

, Diane E. Marting, University of Mississippi, BSS, XCII (2015), 1 March 2015